Urban competitive pattern and its changes in China

Abstract

With the national economy’s transition from a planning one to a market one, the factors affecting regional economic pattern has changed greatly. In this paper we first construct an index system for evaluating competitiveness of Chinese cities based on modern competitive advantage theory. With principal component analysis and cluster analysis methods, we compare the factors affecting cities’ integrated competitiveness in 1990 and 1997. We find that four major factors are capital (including investment, FDI and urban financial revenue), urban infrastructure (transportation and communication, urbanization level, education etc.), industrial performance and structure, degree of market openness and that these factors have become more advanced and complicated since 1990. Most Chinese cities are transforming from productive factors-oriented type to investment-oriented type and a few are becoming innovation oriented. The integrated competitiveness is closely related to cities’ scale, urban function, regional policy and degree of market openness and displays an uneven spatial pattern. The difference between the south and the north and the difference between the west and the east co-exist but the former has been more larger. Finally, we discuss the mechanism behind the pattern and attribute the unevenness to change of factors dominating the cities’ competitiveness regional innovation capacity and geographical difference of traditional culture.